Reviews: Williamson, Jack

Farthest Star —
Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson
Cuckoo, book 1

Frederik
Pohl and Jack Williamson’s 1975
Farthest Star is
the first novel in the
Cuckoo
duology,
which was a fixup of the 1973 novella
Doomship (1973) and the 1974 serial The
Org’s Egg,

Farthest
Star
is
an example of the
Big
Dumb Object
school of science fiction. This makes it cousin to
such classics as
Ringworld,
Rendezvous
with Rama
,
and
Orbitsville,
as well as to books like
The
Wanderer
.

By
the late 21
st
century, humans have made contact with a loose association of alien
civilizations. These civilizations are linked, not by physical
spacecraft, but by near-instantaneous tachyon communication. Tachyon
beams carry information; they cannot transmit matter, but material
objects can be scanned., That information can then be transmitted by
the tachyon transporter, to be duplicated at a distant location
1.
This tech has allowed humans to join the association and travel, as
copies, to other worlds.

What
if the traveller dies? Run off another copy. Or another dozen copies.
Just ask the ill-fated Ben Pertin.

The Starchild Trilogy —
Jack Williamson & Frederik Pohl

1977’s The Starchild Trilogy collects the three short novels of the eponymous trilogy by Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl. I cannot say the novels are actually any good—in fact, I will be devoting a certain amount of space to pointing out the ways that they aren’t—but they certainly are odd and they do offer a remarkable level of wacky fun.